'I try to work on scrapping a little bit each day,' says Dawn, who's a stay-at-home mom. In the planning stage: one dedicated to her husband. In addition to albums for each of her daughters, Dawn keeps a family scrapbook, special scrapbooks for experiences like her daughters' basketball and volleyball camps-and one for each of her dogs. 'There was some scrapbooking stuff on 'Today's Special Values' and it was such a good deal that the Coupon Queen here couldn't pass it up,' laughs Dawn, who confesses that 'my living room is about ready to surrender to being a scrapbooking room.' These days you can also get your supplies at Michael's or Targetor even on QVC, like Dawn Bogg of Northeast Minneapolis. In the past few years, the art of preserving family memories has become big business-a $2.6 billion-a-year one, according to industry estimates. I loved doing that, and it really helped me and my family-telling his life from the moment he was born.' 'All we could do was take pictures of him,' Lori remembers.

Born at 24 weeks gestational age, he weighed just 1 pound, 8 ounces. Though Lori had made a few albums documenting the marathons she'd run in, scrapbooking took on a whole new meaning when her second son was born 16 weeks prematurely. Today, Lori's an active professional, a unit leader with six consultants reporting to her. 'I wanted a discount on all of the Creative Memories stuff I just loved making albums,' she says. Or, like Lori Finanger of Eden Prairie, they become a scrapbook consultant.

These women have their Creative Memories consultant on speed dial, know their local Archiver's inventory as intimately as the contents of their kitchen cupboards, and dream of winning the lottery so they can open their own scrapbook store. The most dedicated of all, according to industry sources, spend more than $50 a month on their hobby. If you save your family photos and put them into albums with a few words or paragraphs, you're part of a hot trend: an amazing 13 percent of all Americans are scrapbookers-most of those are women with children.

I may never finish 'The Book of Joshua,' but it is healing to create the memorial album.' She's since completed an album for her aging mother. 'This year I discovered digital scrapbooking and have finally begun to get some pages completed. Sharon, an attorney from Crystal, started working on a scrapbook about Joshua, primarily for Ben's benefit-and discovered that documenting Joshua's life comforted her. So was his older brother Ben, who never wanted to be an only child. Sharon Kirts was devastated when her younger son, Joshua, died in a ski accident.

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